my life in a philadelphia rowhome with my five children, ages 4 thru 11, and the daily insanity that ensues.

Friday, May 1, 2009

little cleaners

yesterday was my husband's birthday. he gets a free pass.

my husband's aunt came to hang down to hang out with us yesterday and help me get some stuff done. she stayed with the kiddies and baked tommy a birthday cake, while i ran some errands and decorated the front of the house for thomas' first communion on sunday. after dinner and cake and ice cream, i had to take tracy home. she lives about 20 minutes away. tommy stayed with the kids. everyone was bathed and upstairs. the girls were not in their own room, they were still in the "guys" room (it's the cool hangout these days). i asked that he try to put them in their room so they would go to sleep.

this is what i walked into at 10:20 pm last night...tommy fell asleep on the couch, dennis came downstairs and fell asleep on a chair, and the sisters decided to do the dishes, and make eggs, apparently. i walked in the house and saw the girls both standing on a dining room chair that they had dragged over to the sink. the sink was full of water and suds (a half bottle of dish soap had been added to pretty much everything in sight) and there were about four broken eggs on my kitchen floor. WHAT!?!?!?!?!?! are these girls for real? i start yelling like the crazy person i am and try to remove the darlings from the situation. meanwhile, the sink is still running(luckily, i have a big double sink and a stainless steel counter with a lip, so the water did not really run on to the floor). i send the girls upstairs to get baths, and tell tommy i will handle the miss in the kitchen, thinking he would handle the girls (haha...that is what i get for thinking). i cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, which involved a cup stuck down the garbage disposal, hence the non-draining water, soap EVERYWHERE, for real everywhere, my counters are still filmy because of the amount of soap on them; 4 more broken eggs in the sink; and rinsing the soap off of all the clean dishes that were in the drainer.

now, that's a pretty bad night, right? when i get upstairs to throw the girls in the tub...THEY DID IT AGAIN IN THE BATHROOM! brand new bottle of shampoo, half emptied into the tub, shower, floor and potty. i'm not kidding. not to mention their hair and jammies. i walk up to their sweet little voices saying: " look! pink! it pink, now!" in reference to the shampoo in the tub. silly me, i had no idea what they were talking about. (at this point i totally cracked up. it was probably more of a hysterical/insane laugh, but at least no one was physically harmed) i have now filled and rinsed my tub about four times to get the soap out, and i am still not having much luck with it. i have wiped the tub down, but everytime i fill it up, it is a bubble bath. i had to get in the shower with both girls last night to get them completely rinsed. the shower floor was so covered in soap that katie fell and cara slipped.

i frequently remind myself that i really, really wanted a girl and that it is a good thing that i had two at once because, now my daughters have a sister (and my sister is my best friend, so i know that down the line i would have wanted a sister for her) and i only had to be pregnant four times, instead of five. and that is all stuff to be happy about, right? maybe a little happy, right?